Interview with Bill Watkins of Seagate

Recently, there was an interview with the CEO of Seagate, Bill Watkins. While a lot of the content was largely financial and not that fun, he revealed some very interesting tidbits about where Seagate is going, and presumably their competitors as well. The most interesting pieces are on 1.8” HDD and SSDs. In particular, he was asked why SSD hasn't exploded with popularity like they'd hope. He cited many reasons, from quality assurance issues to price and others. Intriguingly, he did not mention reliability as a selling point of SSDs – quite the opposite, actually, stating that currently he doesn't expect an SSD to be any more reliable than a traditional HDD.

SSDs are a very exciting technology, but also a fairly rare one. There are many high-end notebooks that offer them as alternatives to magnetic storage, but the price points on them are often too high and the amount of space too low to convince people to witch. However, we all know it's just a matter of time before that's not true. The numerous advantages SSDs bring will eventually be complemented by much lower pricing and wider availability.

Given how long it took hard drives themselves to go from “enterprise only” to “every desktop in the world”, that's actually a very short time. You can read the entire interview at CNET.